fix it Ben, you gotta

fix things Ben, you gotta

Earlier tonight, Bwog was tipped about various members of CCSC, ESC, and GSSC voicing concerns about the Columbia Political Union’s newfound influence over the upcoming student council election process.

The Columbia Elections Board (CEB), which was founded in 2013 “to conduct and publicize student council elections on campus,” is currently made up of four students, according to the CCSC Spring 2016 Elections Packet, of whom two are on the executive board of the Columbia Political Union (CPU). Given CEB’s founding just a couple years ago, CPU’s exact relationship with the group remains largely unclear to the student body.

According to Adil Mughal, CC ’17, CEB “might disqualify a quarter of the candidates, and they aren’t letting more people register.” If the Elections Board follows through with this action, CPU will essentially have control over this year’s ballot. There are currently seven positions on CCSC with candidates running uncontested, as well as eight positions on ESC and four positions on GSSC, both of which also contain an open seat on the University Senate.

In order to mitigate the number of candidates running for positions uncontested, student councils hope to allow students to re-register in parties. Mughal went on to clarify that “because you have to have a President and Vice President running together on the same ticket, [CEB] may disqualify the students running against CCSC 2017 candidates Jordana Narin/Brennon Mendez. The Elections Board didn’t specify that rule to candidates registering.”

Councils also took issue with the way CEB handled promotion of this year’s election registration. Because of past criticisms over student government exclusivity, councils were looking to expand their reach in the undergraduate community by encouraging a larger number of students to run this year. They believe CEB did a poor job of promoting candidate registration to the student body, inconsistently posting in different class-specific Facebook groups and failing to publish the registration link to their official Facebook page until hours before registration closed.

According to Mughal, CPU’s Membership Director “refuses to admit that the [Columbia Elections Board] did anything wrong, and thinks that [re-]opening registration is too much of a hassle.”

Update (11:51 pm): The original post contained misinformation from Spectator, which falsely reported that CEB chose not to use the University Senate listserv to share registration information for the first time.

Update (4/30, 11:03 pm): Emails from CPU have attempted to clarify the relationship between CPU and CEB; apparently, there have been no changes to the election process, but CPU has been hosting information about the elections on CEB’s behalf in order to promote civic engagement. CPU’s role is “purely publicity,” while we are told CEB is completely in charge of running the election, and is independent of CPU.

Fix it Ben via Ben’s Facebook